It is not so funny (to him, the writer, or to me, the reader). He punctuates his messages (or, I could say, though I am writing which limits or does not limit what I can say) he could say (his thoughts as he thinks them), could say the punctuations in asides (whispers to the audience, or howling to the – if there is anyone out there) breaking through the fourth wall. He, the author, is a generous artist and was a generous child (he has written about getting bullied in school even though he was an all around excellent athlete), but he did not bully back.
Let me begin, Entry 1 DMD (I mean in his first entry in SENTENCE ) he is drinking with another passenger on the train (not yet another but just that one other) and talking. He (the author) sized him up and guessed he (the other guy) was also a Russian Jew. Was he? Was he (the author) qualified to make that identification? It did not matter what anyone thought because (conveniently) it was stamped into the passports. They drank so much, it is amazing how they could still talk, these strangers. (DMD: DeadManDrinking) The passenger (not the author who is a passenger, too) reveals that he has terminal cancer. They fall asleep (pass out). The author finds (not the absolute right word because I am short of time) the other guy was gone (the author is aware time is short, he reminds me of that). Here we remember a movie in which a passenger (it is only one) meets another passenger. Outrageously, they find they each have the same yearning (it is to kill their wives, not with the wives side by side, not both of them killing both together, one at a time). This is not the yearning of two real passengers including the author (deep yearning, yearning in each breath). They (author and the not author) yearn for life. They met by accident. Drank together (as much as they could). They shared intimate, personal stories, memories. They became close friends, but when the author awakens, the friend was gone. It could happen. The sudden realization that someone’s not there. Booze and personal stories. He left. He thought (the author thought) he would see him (the one with terminal cancer) again. The unknown passenger, though he brushes off the terminal cancer, he has accepted it (who can accept that?). Everyone knows this could happen (it could happen) though no one wants it (or sees it). Well, we would not (could not) have the fly-on-the-ceiling’s point of view.
Let us face the communistic setting of SENTENCE. The author confesses that he drew pictures of monsters. Americans were the monsters. He knew (who told him?) that the Russian people only wanted peace and never (could not) want war. Who said that? Mikhail (we are on first name basis) had marched to celebrate a war hero. He had the honor of carrying a banner. His maternal grandparents disappeared. His grandfather was a loyal communist; so were his grandfather’s friends. The friends started to disappear, his wife, Mikhail’s grandmother, “dragged him” to Belarus. Things were OK, then, not. They were gone. No idea. It was 1939. The world (the whole world) changed.
Mikhail Iossel described a wolf in a zoo cage. The wolf circled around the cage. The wolf did not stop circling. Mikhail Iossel faced the wolf and felt the wolf’s eyes focusing on his eyes. There were too many thoughts (oh, you think the wolf could not think?) and instinct and exhaustion in those eyes. That was the one moment when the wolf paused. Russian children’s stories (folk-tales, it is not the children’s fault) about wolves are, according to the author, sadistic. Vicious. Sadistic treatment to the wolf. Later, the wolf will drop dead in “mid trot.” Entry 13 MAY 12: THE WOLF p 76
This was the time for Mikhail Iossel to get out of Dodge (Matt Dillon was not the Stalin of Dodge City, Kansas. “Justice, justice”) and go somewhere where no one will be shooting at him (maybe Kansas, could be).
Throughout SENTENCE, the author writes brief phrases that he repeats many times until another entry calls forth another phrase. In the entry number “19,” titled “I AM,” he uses the word cute. “The blue sky of my eight-year-old world this is a bit too cutely put maybe, feeling the soft hesitant wind on my there needs to be an adjective here skin...” p103 A Professor of Literature and an award winning author, he allows his readers to see his personal corrections or him fiddling with which word goes where. He describes autumn in Leningrad (it was Leningrad when he grew up there, and it was still Leningrad when he left, age 30, in 1986). “Lemmingrad I just typed out blindly, the city of Lemmings, moving on, I am not a blind typist but I am a clear-sighted, this is a bit too cutely put also, don’t get carried away...” p103
Is Mikhail the one who does not like writing that comes out “cute?” Is this his standard? It (could be) OK to critique something he sees to be too cute because he is sure his readers are not people who like “cute.” Or it might be a rap on knuckles that write cutely, something not allowed by a current Politburo of Literature. The readers might learn to admire more refined writing. Mikhail wrote this as a fully adult writer, whose writing is his own style, and yet (here we go) the Politburo of Literature accepts the style, but maybe Mikhail does not really mean that they should accept.
Mikhail knows he should shake his manuscript hard enough that anything cute will fall off. No idea. Except, Mikhail was writing about how he felt when he was an 8 year old. Maybe his thoughts were cute when he was 8 when he observed from at least 22 years after. However, he treats the child-him with care and respect for his life, the life that was the only life that he could live. As his reader, I must consider all the variables and come back (could be) in November, 2026.
An odd coincidence: Before I was offered to read and review SENTENCE, I had been thinking about SAMIZDAT writers and their writing. I wanted to know how to spell it. The reason that SAMIZDAT came to mind (could be) because I was thinking that we (the monsters, the Americans) had better get themselves organized (that could be cute for those writers) if they want to have others read their poetry and possibly write political denunciations. Of any side. Open minded (a person in D.C. thought there were good people on both sides). It turned out that Mikhail was in fact a member of a SAMIZDAT writers’ group. I discovered that whatever Mikhail’s attitudes (when very young) toward Stalin (his other grandfather cried when Stalin died), he is not shy about publishing his point of view of the current occupant of the White House, in Washington, D.C.
For the American-monsters, there is a lot of self-censoring going on. Moving on (a favorite of repeating phrases) do you have friends who only show pictures of cats, sometimes babies, the beauty they find in Palm Desert on Facebook pages, moving on to explain one is sleeping, teaching, traveling and forgot about marching. Then, one reads Mikhail, who is employed in Montreal (still North America, but claims fewer monsters), and he lets it all out. Moving on, there are more items on my outline (could be my time is short) to remind you (if any one is reading this) you should get this book. Read the author’s position on “a bipedal manatee... in surprisingly little bronze make-up wearing a sweat-stained white polo shirt that accentuated nicely his sloping breasts and quietly undulating belly, with his helplessly white little hands tied behind his back and a Soviet-era filter-less Belomor papirose (look it up, if curious, my hypothetically reader) stuck in the corner of his tightly grinning mouth with thin colourless lips, staring with contempt and perhaps even a smidgen of pity at a surprisingly and almost grotesquely long line of the firing squad in front of him, at least thirty faceless men...” Entry 33 FINISHING SENTENCE p 150 I appreciate this descriptive commentary except that I treasure manatees. I get it about the shape, OK, but manatees are peaceful vegetarians now near extinction. Which means manatees do have a shape in common with the person, but only that.
It saddens me to stop quoting this narration. Moving on (again this is one of the significant phrases which repeat both for the rhythm of the words and the meaningful message they make, for example, “crying crying crying” but, moving on, I left out the next four “crying”s, not because it is not important to have all 7 of them but because Mikhail tells us another phrase (my time is short). OK, just a bit more. “Crying (remember: 7 times) over Pmurt, that bastard, yes for nobody not even the seventy-plus millions of his voters, loved him anymore that flatulent blob of rancid protoplasm (the simple truth is, winning doesn’t mean you’re right, and losing doesn’t mean you’re wrong, reader.)” Entry 35 CRYING p154 Pmurt is backwards. Since we are visiting a mind that has room for Russian and English, we (maybe not you, Reader, up to you) will assume it is a diminutive in Russian (but in English, it is just backwards).
SENTENCE reminds me of my Russian professor, sophomore year. Mrs. Smith (a Russian who lived in Manchuria which was held by Russia for a while) married a Mr. Smith (but that did not undo her Russian-ness). She taught me Russian is different than English. They cannot be translated using only words (yes, only words, they are what we have). Russian wants/likes/writes long (could be) almost endlessly long sentences while English likes them short. American English, especially short. From earliest school assignments, we learned that a run-on sentence is not allowed. It might be a sentence missing a verb with multiple subjects, definitely taboo. Not saying Russian makes run-on sentences, only that the language can stand, run, or walk without tiring. It could be an Olympic event. Running on sentences. Hemingway says The Sun Also Rises; it has the chance to go up and go back down. Done. It’s Curtain for Sun. Reading Mikhail’s explanation of Mrs. Smith’s gives me great confidence in both.
Mikhail receives praise for sentences that do not end. It is the no-period triumph. To this reader (I am still here) it satirizes (moving on) the Russian on and on.
Mikhail’s writing of brief observances and the longer entries create his philosophy of words. The philosophy is present in entries that describe a professor gradually losing his memory. I read that professor as Mikhail. Moving on, I do not think he is losing anything, or that the story is true, even though it makes sense on a philosophical plane (partly a physical one). “he grew increasingly more forgetful of words and names and other parts and segments of two languages at once, more mnemonically myopic, if you will (while at the same time, the distance vision of his faraway early memories of his childhood and youth seemed to become sharper, crisper, more focused...” he substituted missing words with “synonym, alternate, euphemism....told the class then to google Gulag also, google Gulag, google Gulag, ...gulag has no synonyms, euphemistically speaking... all those synonyms, in their turn, would proceed to generate the synonymic substitutes of their own, burgeoning, multiplying and proliferating, progressively more far-fetched and implausible, whimsically tangential, divergent...” “...would it be so unthinkable to have the soothing and comforting thoughts of ceasing to exist at his age given his mordant macabre dismal existential situation, OK (moving on) it would be nice to outlive Putin...” p 115,117
Beginning this review, I wrote that SENTENCE is not so funny as other reviewers, readers, experts at electromagnetic engineering find it to be. Not so funny for the author and not so funny to this reader. There are moments filled with hilarious observations. The music for the execution? Roy Orbison (Mikhail knows music: when getting beat up from an “overload of cruel merriment” he writes “killing me softly” and “fool fool fool ...”+ six more “fool”s) p 103 The very long firing squad stood in front of a happy dictator. The eye-witness descriptions were funny. Then, one realizes it is the surface appearance of the world, but how our world works has been changed, turned into something else.
Mikhail’s parents waited until he was 8 years old to tell him he (and they) were Jewish. Different. Not one of “them,” instead, one of “us.” The USSR had no religion. “...I am a Jew and am supposed to want nothing more in the world than to harm the good, kind, eternally trustful Russian people.” His beloved Lyuba, the family’s live- in nanny believed in god. Lyuba “love of my early childhood, this maybe too cutely put” shared her illegal secret. Entry 19 I AM p 93 However, both Jews and Muslims are outside of the Russian (Christian) world because of their religions. Mikhail felt that heavy saddlebag of being-Jewish and kept a file of mental onslaught. He knows it is there...“a tsunami of anti-Semitism is rolling all across the world again, for the second time in my life” Entry 37 LIFE HAPPENED p 182
Fewer parenthetic comments appear as the book closes. Phrases are reminders (I already said that...I think...no time) (no time...stop wasting time ) “ under some silly self-imposed time constraint, twenty-four minutes now...still some time left, perhaps in more ways than one) Entry 37 LIFE HAPPENED p 172 One of his students “said in a carefully hesitant voice, “but...but... what happened...to your, well, looks or whatever to put it bluntly, to your physique, your hair, your entire body... does this happen to everyone...”(she would say) “I refuse to believe it could happen to the lovely vibrant student,” she decides the professor has bad genes, should eat vegetables, maybe he drinks...
Mikhail loves language. He knows words can fall in love with each other. They fit together. SENTENCE is about life and death. Death is there, but in a smaller role. Mikhail knows. Life is enormous for him. It is full of love, strange adventures, strange people. His love for life wraps around him. He has “his ravaged animal heart,” p 76 and also knows “Sometimes just listening to the rain all night is enough.” Entry 16 RAIN p 87
SENTENCE: stories, by Mikhail Iossel, Linda Leith Publishing, Montreal, 2025